


what we talk about when we talk about certainty

by ninemoons42



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Action & Romance, Action Thriller Elements, Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Canon-Typical Violence, Escape, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Inspired by Music, M/M, Major Character Injury, Porn With Plot, Prompt Fic, Prompt Fill, Self-Sacrifice, Smut and Feels, establishing a relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-23
Updated: 2018-06-23
Packaged: 2019-05-25 18:51:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14983367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Why does this shit keep happening to him? He doesn’t know, and even if there were any answers forthcoming he’s long since become numb to hearing them. His not to reason why, his but to do, and every time he doesn’t die is saving up for another time for him to do exactly that. Killed by enemy agents, or left behind as a sacrifice -- he knows all of this, it’s in his bones, it’s practically written into his DNA at this point --





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be five ficlets to fill five prompts from friends over on Tumblr, but my brain decided to weld all five prompts together into one single AU and one single fic and -- well, here we are, guys.
> 
> (The five prompts were, in no particular order: Zip Me, Value Me, Haunt Me, Nurse Me, and Shag Me.)

Tempest-beat of his heart hammering in his ears: his cover’s blown to pieces anyway, all the painstakingly crafted legends shredding away with every step and every leap forward and upward and so he runs, and he flicks out the knives he’s wearing in the sleeves of his jacket, the blades warmed by his wrists as he swings for the throat of the sentry who’s stepping into the stairwell -- swing and flash of ghastly fluorescent tubes overhead, reflected in the gleaming black of one knife and then the other, and then that sentry is no more than a body, no more than an obstacle that he clears with a spring and a grunt, and he needs to conserve his strength because he’s got a long way to climb yet -- still, he runs, and he sweats, and he swears under his breath, because there’s no one here in these winding passages to hear him.

Or, if there’s anyone to hear him -- he leaves them swiftly dead in his wake, slashed eyes and slashed throats -- and only for a moment does he believe that there’s some kind of ghostly voice rising in the earpiece he’s wearing. Ghostly voice, swearing in counterpoint, in elegant flawless high Tenebrae dialect, and there’s only one person in the world he’s ever heard swear that way. Swearing like singing a song, swearing like weaving a lethal verse, and that’s Ignis Scientia all over, not a dream and not a ghost.

So Noctis Caelum -- Agent Stardust -- stops dead in his tracks and throws his left-hand knife into some other poor enemy soldier’s heart, and the black blade drips blood as he goes to retrieve it and he slashes that throat, too, for good measure, because the whole point is that he leaves no one alive in his wake, because it’s better to leave a dead-twice-over corpse than to chance a shot in the back.

(He wakes up, sometimes, utterly silent, utterly frozen screams catching soundlessly in his throat, remembering his first kill, that he’d come so close to botching, and in sight of his own father -- his own actual principal in that mission. His father Regis, who’d been under his protection: he’d been careless, he’d been feckless, he’d been so idiotically proud and he’d still ended up with his father bleeding and limping, because he’d left the last of their pursuers almost dead -- and that one, all haunted gleaming-gold eyes, had come so fucking close to murdering Regis and then Noctis himself.)

(He still has that blade and their mingled blood on it, father’s blood and son’s blood. He still remembers that enemy agent whose neck he’d broken, barehanded. A kill he’d never been trained for: and he’d done it, shaking with rage all the while. Shaking to keep all his screams inside. That gold-eyed agent’s head twisted horribly, lethal angle, broken neck sporting Noctis’s own scarlet-smeared fingerprints.)

Break in the vile quietly blistering stream of words over his earpiece: “I’m tracking hostiles in pursuit.”

“Backup?” And Noctis invests the brief question with far too many shades of meaning: _Did you even bother to send backup? Why aren’t they here yet? Who ordered the backup to stay so far away that they might as well be useless?_

And he smirks, dead inside, when the answer takes far too long to arrive. “...On the way.”

“I don’t believe you at all,” Noctis mutters, and he’s finally pushing onto the roof of the building and he turns around and around. Deserted stretch of flat concrete and the lines marking a landing spot, and he’s not looking out at the glittering heartless stars overhead -- he’s looking for the shadow that should be eclipsing those stars, the shadow that should be bearing down on him out of the night -- not backup, not a damn hope of it -- just transportation, to get out of this thrice-cursed place.

This very place that he hates, that he spits upon, and he smells the metallic rasp of blood in a dark patch between his feet. Bruises and the long shallow slash up his right side. The tender spots in his cheeks where he’s cut himself open on his own teeth once again, because he’d started this whole night and this whole mission with playing at being the bad guys’ punching bag.

Again.

Why does this shit keep happening to him? He doesn’t know, and even if there were any answers forthcoming he’s long since become numb to hearing them. His not to reason why, his but to do, and every time he doesn’t die is saving up for another time for him to do exactly that. Killed by enemy agents, or left behind as a sacrifice -- he knows all of this, it’s in his bones, it’s practically written into his DNA at this point -- 

So. Escape. Left to his own devices as usual.

And he begins by -- tearing off his earpiece and the trailing wires to the tiny transceiver he’s been wearing in his collar. Not a care in the world for the tinny screech of dead and dying radio circuits, when he stomps on the little devices. Not a care in the world for the half-strangled warning he gets from Ignis -- and that is not a knock on the man himself, because the truth is that Ignis, too, has started to ask the dangerous questions, has started to show those tell-tale tiny cracks in his perfectly loyal and perfectly competent facade, and he’s still making his elaborate show of being Noctis’s primary handler, heedless of the danger to Noctis’s life unless he’s actively walking into death.

The point is, the point is, why is Noctis being thrown again and again into these situations? Why does he seem to be trapped in this cycle of being saved -- only to be directly endangered once again?

Neither of them have come up with any answers.

Noctis is done with the stonewalled lack of answers.

So he kills one set of transceivers and he fumbles for the second set -- the one he’s been hiding in the pocket of his jacket all this time -- and he puts the black pieces on with shaking hands and mutters, “Rogue.”

“Say again,” is the high-pitched metal-shred response, that he only catches after he repeats the code word two more times. “Say again.”

“Stardust is off the fucking board,” he says. 

“Trust you to make me lose a bet,” and as the words go on, the filtering drops away and he recognizes the voice with a shock: low sweet graveled hiss. Ignis’s accent, only even more refined. A woman’s voice. 

Lunafreya’s voice. 

“I’ll make it up to you,” he mutters, not quite in disbelief. 

“You better. You just cost me a really, really nice dinner, multiple courses and dessert and wine pairings, the works.” Clack and clatter and clash of a keyboard, the ragged rhythm of those sounds weaving into Lunafreya’s words. “Okay. Okay. Did Ignis ever brief you on the -- on the protocol for this? Because I don’t have it all memorized.”

“Then who’s going to help me? That was kind of the whole point.”

“Yes, I know, I know, sorry Noctis. We sort of had a different procedure, when it was me and Ravus, when it was Aranea breaking us out. The exit strategy’s always tailored.”

“So who’s got _my_ strategy?” He reaches, not so idly, for his right-hand knife. 

If all else fails he can -- turn the blade on himself, and seal the deal by -- going over the edge -- he’s walking towards flimsy railings and he’s, he can’t believe he’s doing this, and he feels so calm and so icy as he looks down and the sidewalk below him is as distant as the surface of the moon, as distant as the polestar glittering far above him, far overhead.

“Does my strategy even exist?”

“Yes, it does, we’re just trying to find your point -- ”

“Have you misplaced that person?”

“No, but damn, you run like you’ve got every demon from every hell on your heels.”

That answer doesn’t come from his earpiece.

That answer comes from right behind him.

And Noctis doesn’t think, doesn’t even consider the possibilities or the alternatives -- he just whirls, he just springs forward and his hands are already leading him forward, fingers splayed and clawed and hooking for a bared throat, for the pulse beating wild and visible beneath pale skin -- 

Grunt, shoulders weaving and moving, and the unmistakable X of forearms crossed to protect that vulnerable juncture of skin and bones and blood, the place where the life bubbles up so close to the surface -- Noctis growls and bares his teeth and clenches one hand into a fist and there’s so very little room to swing here, less than the length of his arm, and he does it anyway, to stun, to take this person down --

“Noct,” is the word he hears, even as he crashes into contact and the person before him is falling over like that’s an easy thing to do, like that’s even some kind of viable option.

That nickname, and in the night the vivid flash of starlight in blue-violet eyes. 

In going down to the concrete a patch of black falls away, too, and the person before Noctis is revealed.

“I know you,” Noctis says. “I remember you.”

“Maybe you should, I’ve only been watching your six for years.”

Golden-pale hair, freed of a black hat, and those intense eyes. Stitch-puckered scar, dark line drawing down, the top of it nicking an ear and the bottom of it disappearing into the collar. Mouth twisted in an expression Noctis has never seen before, too warm to be a sneer, too kind to be defiance. Throat, not quite bared, no trace of submission in the arch of it.

Like iron filings to a magnet, he touches the scar, somewhere in the vicinity of the Adam’s apple. “This. I know this scar.”

Cough and laugh all at once, and -- Noctis is being thrown off, thrown back, and he catches himself on his hand and stares. 

“Yes you do and you’ve done such a good job of forgetting, too.”

“Stardust, last chance to confirm,” he hears Lunafreya say, suddenly. “Unless you want to go back onto the board -- and you need to know, if you are, that all the pieces are moving and they’re all looking for you.”

“So what choice do I actually have?” he mutters. “What are the chances I actually get out of this one alive? I can run from Ignis pretty much forever. I can, I think I can run from my father and the people between him and me. But I’m nothing without any kind of backup.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. I just said, I’ve been watching you escape death.”

He glares, then, at the person on the rooftop. “I can’t honestly tell whether you want me to live or die, because you look like you want to throw me off this building and you also keep saying you’ve been saving my life, so -- what the actual fuck. If you’re here to end me can you at least be -- merciful? Do it the way I’d do it. At least I don’t see the point in drawing death out, if it has to happen by my hands.”

“Unless it’s an enemy operative and then you’ll be cruel. Like I said. I’ve been watching you. I’ve seen you smile, you know, and -- you smile when you kill people because _they need to be killed_. And I can’t say you’ve been wrong, in those judgments.” Shrug of black-jacketed shoulder in the night. “I want to have that certainty of yours. I have to rely on the others to provide it for me, sometimes.”

“Do I have to repeat your words back to you?” Lunafreya, again, no more than a distant voice. “The ones about selling yourself short -- Prompto?”

The name.

Noctis blinks, and stares, because the pieces are falling together for him and the picture is -- the picture is -- 

*

He gets to his feet, coughing, sputtering, and the cold air hits him like a storm of blades, like the wrong kind of fiery pain -- like he’ll burn up in response and then turn into nothing more than a scatter of red droplets on the snow -- the chopper whirls out of sight and the snow-flurry world around him is a world of no shadows, a world of enemies sneaking up on him -- adrenaline and cortisol, the worst cocktail of all, and he can’t scream out his fear and his hurt and he’s still got to find his objectives and his enemies in this icy hellscape -- 

Reluctantly he takes stock of himself. Of what he’s got. Supplies. Scant rations. Scant water. The jackets and the thermal underwear and the light ballistic vest are the only actually useful items that he’s been given for this specific task. One piddling carbine and a pouch of ammunition. 

And in his ear: “What the fuck did they give me a radio for then?” 

“Maybe because you’re supposed to listen to me,” is the unexpected response. The voice only sounds light. Only sounds unassuming: because Noctis has been hearing this voice over the long lonely marching nights of other training exercises. The hours of the meat-grinder of their lives. This voice, this nearly-erased accent, light and capable and sounding exactly as it does now, even after a series of frighteningly precise shots. Large-caliber bullets and the neatly calculated drop of each, against wind and gravity, killing those enemies that Noctis couldn’t reach in time. 

“You again?” he asks, as he stares sightlessly out at the mountain and its icy slopes, the field he’s been dropped into, that’s been sown with crags and boulders. “What are you doing here?”

“Giving you directions, to start with. I know where the supplies are. I’ll be moving with you. But I’m supposed to stay out of sight unless it all goes to hell, and that’s not something for either of us to decide.”

He’s starting to hate that idea, but he laughs anyway. “So what else is new.”

“I don’t think anything is, Noctis, and -- I’m probably too young to be saying that.”

“Shut up, Prompto,” he says. “We’re not supposed to know shit like that about each other.”

“Anyone who looks at you and looks at me can pretty much tell we’re in the same age group,” and he thinks Prompto might be rolling his eyes as he speaks, but that’s just his imagination, isn’t it? How can he think about shit like that? He doesn’t even know where in all this fuck-off mountain Prompto is. “And also, the fact that we’re being sent out to do this shit, means we’re young and we’re stupid and we’re reckless enough to go charging out when they tell us to.”

“Says you,” he mutters. The sun-flashes on the snow leave him blinking, and he gives in to the inevitable, and he has no grace in the giving in. “Where do I need to go?”

“Just follow the sound of my voice, I’ll guide you.” Pause. Breath. “You gotta trust me on this one, Noct.”

“Do I have a choice? Prom.” He tries the nickname out. It’s -- not wrong, it doesn’t weigh his mouth down, he thinks.

“You do, you could always run -- but -- I’d still have the directions.”

“Maybe,” he says, and then: “Let’s do this.”

*

He’s facedown, he’s choking on a mouthful of crushed stone, and every last inch of the rest of him is coated in a thin scum of blood. Not just his own, he knows that, because his knuckles are nothing more than dull throbbing pain. He can feel the broken bones in his feet and in his legs. At least there are people here who are dead, and these are the people he’d been sent to kill, and -- it’s all right, if he’s going to die here with them.

He did his duty. That’s a fact, and that’s the only relevant fact. No need to say or do or add anything else.

He’s done his duty and he -- he can at least think to choose the hour of his own death. The method of it. He can feel the blood pooling in the blank broken spaces of his body and he can still find his own knives, his own weapons, and he can choose how he’s going to go. Choose when.

He remembers choking out his enemies, drawing out the killing. Remembers grinning with his own blood dripping from the corners of his mouth, pleased to be able to watch the life fading from every other pair of eyes. 

And he also remembers the impact of a hundred fists against his skin, a thousand, remembers curling desperately and uselessly in on himself and -- remembers being racked on that pain and on the beatings and -- 

He remembers breaking out somehow, inspired into one last burst of recklessness because he’d heard a voice, because he’d heard a shout that hadn’t been torn from his own throat.

World of muffled din around him, muffled echoes, as he smiles and draws his knife. Runs it down the length of his arm. His enemies are dead and there’s no hope for him to get out, so he’ll choose this place, he’ll lay his load down, because he’s done with his duty, done with his tasks, and he presses the blade slightly into his skin and the blood wells up from that sliver-slice, from that barest pressure, and he can still see the red of it despite the shadows, the dust, the pain that blinds him.

“Help!”

That voice! That voice again, and from so close by! It pierces him as it already did, and he drops the knife and doesn’t realize that he’s done it -- he’s kicking past the corpses and he’s looking for that weakening wavering voice, and those cursed echoes seem to fill him up with that helplessness, with that pain that isn’t even his, that broken low cry.

Dust in the hair, dull lifeless strands. Noctis feels every last bruise and broken line in his face and -- this person before him is even more shattered than he is. Ripped sutures that had held the throat closed, and the exposed neck, the exposed chest, is covered in a stopped flow of crimson, tacky and clinging and hideous.

“Prom,” he hears himself say.

How can Prompto still be alive? But he is, impossibly: Noctis can feel the straining heartbeat, can see the heave of the failing breaths, and -- what can he do? What is left to him to help with?

And that’s when he sees the wires trailing from Prompto’s pockets and -- it’s not hope that makes him reach for those dark strands. That makes him shout into the cracked black box that they lead to: “Operative down! I need help!”

Not hope that he feels but the rising inexorable tide of sheer desperation: please, please, he finds himself thinking. Please, let this person survive.

Please, let him survive.

Indistinct voices rising, garbled, and he doesn’t understand a damn word: just keeps repeating himself until his own throat gives out, parched, wounded.

And he doesn’t know what he can do except that -- he’s still got a shirt on somehow. Not for long. He tears it away. The other knife’s good enough for cutting the dirty material into strips and he can’t be helping -- he might be harming -- he thinks he’s compelled, anyway, because Prompto is lying completely silent in his arms and that’s -- that’s not how the world works. The world is not supposed to go on turning, if Prompto’s gone silent and blank and blind.

Even in the stealthy moments, even in the sneaking moments, in the midst of stealing secrets and leaving behind lies, when they couldn’t even properly exchange any words -- he’d still been able to hear the breaths alongside his own. 

Breaths gone too shallow now, too faint now.

He binds up Prompto’s throat, and doesn’t know where the other wounds might be -- maybe that’s what will kill him and something in Noctis’s own chest slams closed and pitiful and pained at the thought. 

When the shirt is nothing more than the leftovers and scraps that he couldn’t use, and the blood has been wiped away, he pulls Prompto close, and he doesn’t speak, doesn’t cry, doesn’t dare to hope.

*

“You heard Luna,” and Noctis blinks.

The memories heave and roll past him, spiraling down, and carrying him in their merciless wake.

And still he’s looking at an extended hand. At Prompto standing over him. 

At Prompto saying, “I heard you say it. I heard you say _Rogue_. So this is your last chance to change your mind. If you want to get back into play, if you want to go back to the people who keep sending you off on these missions of yours, I can get out of here and we’ll pretend we never saw each other. And we’ll probably never see each other again, unless -- ”

Noctis watches him swallow, watches him look away, and for a moment all the poor light that picks him out in his steady shape in this darkness seems to be eclipsed by something else, something very much like fear -- fear that Noctis knows, but he’s never seen it until now, until the moment when that other person draws his thumb across his own scarred throat. 

“But if you mean it, if you’re running, you have to come with me now.”

This is one of those hinges in his life. One of those decisions that he’ll carry for the rest of his days.

He’s already made the decision before he can even think on it, and he says, “Because I’m going to die, anyway: if not tonight, then on some other night like this.”

Before he gets to his own feet, before he stares at Prompto’s hand -- he performs the same gesture, thumb across throat.

“Something like that.” Prompto is still looking at him with those too-dark eyes.

“They told me you died,” Noctis says, after a long pause of howling night. Overhead, the stars are going out, falling away, behind a veil of clouds, behind deepening shadows.

“Luna and the others said if I wanted to get out clean, if I wanted to get out with a blank slate like I wanted -- I had to get out in a coffin. Or something like it. You know how these things go.” 

“No I don’t.”

He doesn’t want to look at the weary wary lines in Prompto’s face. The scars of him, that he wears so openly.

Not like the scars Noctis conceals from himself even in the mirror, because he’s learned to pretend they don’t exist.

But now Prompto is stepping closer. That hand, that had been offered to him, is moving even closer. 

Noctis almost, almost manages not to flinch, when he makes contact and -- then he does almost back away, when he feels the gentle stroke of fingertips against his skin, tracing out the ragged faded star-outline low on his right cheek.

He almost manages to choke back the word “Don’t.”

“I just wanted to know,” is Prompto’s response, too small, too quiet, and these are the words that seem torn away by the wind and by the night. “I won’t do it again.”

“I don’t know,” Noctis mutters. “I don’t know if I want you to know it’s there. I don’t know if I want you to forget it’s there.”

“It’s part of you. I don’t judge it. It’s just something that helps add up to you.” The words remain quiet, and compelling. “Like those knives are part of you, like they add up to you, and -- you use them so easily. On others, yes, because that’s your job. You kill like you breathe and I envy you that. I still have to psych myself up every time I have to pull that fucking trigger -- ”

“But I was jealous of the way you take your shot. Every single shot,” Noctis says, running all over Prompto’s words. “I was jealous because you always seemed so certain.”

“I know how a gun works. I know how bullets work. That’s the certainty. You aim, you fire, and if you do it right, the bullet goes where you want it to. That’s what I know. That’s just the facts of it. Certainty? Maybe it looks like that to you. _You_ are what certainty looks like, when I think of the word.”

Again that shadow that wings past that compelling blue-violet. “Certainty -- even when you’ve decided you want to turn your own knives on yourself. You know that. You feel it and you feel that way to me. And you do it so easily, I hate it so much, looking at you and you’re ready to do -- what exactly?”

“Give up,” Noctis says, after a long moment.

“Give up -- go rogue,” he adds, he clarifies, meaning the words for anyone else who might be listening in, especially on Lunafreya’s end. 

And he takes a deep breath, and reaches out to Prompto’s hand, suspended still in the spaces between them.

Cold, Prompto’s hand is cold, but only on the initial contact -- and the longer Noctis holds on, because it’s like a switch in his mind has been flipped and now he needs to keep holding on, now he can’t even make himself think of letting go -- the longer Noctis holds on the closer Prompto seems to be getting, until -- 

One-handed grace, and he watches open-mouthed as Prompto works his jacket off, leaves it hanging on by their joined hands. “Put this on,” he hears Prompto say, quietly. “I don’t want you to get cold.”

“Is that what we’re doing? Oh, well.” Lunafreya sounds both amused and resigned at the same time, Noctis thinks, and he has to pull away from Prompto to be able to pull the jacket on, and to do up the buckles down the front, and he takes a deep breath of the night-winds caught in the warmth of the shearling collar. A scent like lightning piercing through distant rains that taste of copper and rust, and beneath it all the sharp tang of gunpowder, and he thinks that latter scent must catch somewhere in the back of his mind, with hooks, with claws.

Why does he find that scent so reassuring? 

So much so that he leaps forward, the moment Prompto says, “Run!”

And out of the long long moments of talking and staring and trying to work through the thickets of his memories, he’s glad to be running, glad to be reaching out towards the back of Prompto, who is -- running straight for the railings, straight for the edge of the building, catching Noctis’s hand at the last second and shouting: “Hold on!”

The wind shrieks in his ears, protesting -- the same wind that seems to seize him and throw him straight into Prompto -- who catches him with only a whistling “Ooof!” 

Falling, unimaginably. 

But he’s calm, and he’s not at all afraid, not of Prompto’s face in falling, eyes closed and eyelashes casting long shadows over freckled cheekbones, different arcs of darkness, and he closes his eyes too.

The jerk and the physical smashing blow of the parachute billowing open is -- almost expected, even after he realizes it was deployed at the very last possible minute, in the very last hair-trigger minute before they passed the point of no return and of being actually splattered onto the uncaring concrete of the world at street level.

There’s nothing to fear in an end like that, when he’s spent all these nights running on the very razor’s edge of his wits, of his tasks. Running the gauntlet of enemies foreign and domestic. 

There’s nothing to fear in an end in which Prompto’s arms are tight around him, holding him, holding him together.

But this is no end at all, not by any definition of the word, and he feels the jolt of it when he finally lands, when Prompto lands with him, on a street corner without any illumination and without any trace of life passing by.

“You’re good,” he hears Lunafreya say. “Getaway?”

“Got that.” Prompto, quiet, knowing, adept. 

And Noctis casts off the old certainties and the old fears as he turns back towards Prompto -- as he mutters, “Let me.”

“Noctis.”

He doesn’t respond. His hands move, swift and sure and -- certain, that’s the word Prompto used -- certain as he divests Prompto of all his buckles and all his straps, all the now-unwieldy flight and pile of the deployed parachute, and he sighs in relief when it’s all gone, when it all falls and billows away.

Weightless, is what he feels like. Weightless, and perhaps something close to free, even though he knows he’s going to live looking over his shoulder for a long time yet. The habit will stay with him because it’s been with him for all of his days and all of his nights. It’s like breathing, it’s like knowing the difference between an overhand knife throw and a backhand knife throw, it’s like knowing ten different routes to get out of a place he’s never been before, and -- this is a place he’s never been before, he thinks.

Walking into some unknown hour of some unknown night, and not to lead, or to follow orders that have been imposed on him.

Walking away of his own free will.

Pang of regret, refracting in his heart and turning into a bittersweet bruising tinge, as he thinks of Ignis, as he thinks of his father, as he thinks of the people who’d been content to use him as nothing more than a cat’s paw, their bloody knife in the dark.

The thought makes him stand and cover his face and -- he inhales, exhales, doesn’t cry.

He shivers and shakes all over.

Even when the arms wrap around him: one around his shoulders, one around his hips. The arms around him, bracing him, bearing him up, letting him lean into warmth and commiseration and the gently sympathetic hum of Prompto’s voice, and that gives him the courage to ask: “Was it like this for you?”

“Not really,” is the answer that he feels, the words that travel strange and quiet through him. “I’m not supposed to tell you this. But I blew up my old outfit when I left.” Chuckle, only a little rueful, jagged edges. “I actually managed to catch most of those assholes in the blast radius, and I didn’t think that was actually going to happen. All I wanted was to vanish into the night and, you know, they could just assume I’d dropped dead somewhere, or I’d gotten wasted by some lucky idiot. But Luna talked me into it and now I can’t say I regret planting all those bombs. Those people were -- not like the ones who taught you things.”

“You left us anyway. You died, is what they told me.”

“Sorry, Noct. I never had a choice.”

He wants to hear the story. He doesn’t want to hear the story. His heart aches at the thought of Prompto being forced into doing something, into doing anything. 

“Forget it,” he says. “Forget it, Prom.”

“I’d like to. I still need help with that.”

“Yeah. I, I want to help you. I want to learn how to ask you for help,” and he reaches with his hands, for Prompto’s wrists, and he holds on.

And he doesn’t pull away, not even when a car pulls up to a smokescreen stop next to them and he actually recognizes the driver -- honey-gold curls shining in the dark hours, casual friendly drawl, and he mutters greetings to Cindy and he slides into the back seat, into that place between sleeping and waking, and all the reality in the world that he knows, all the certainty that’s left to him, is of Prompto’s arms holding him close.


	2. Chapter 2

He wakes up and hears the echoes of his own gasps for breath, and he’s sitting up and reaching blindly for the gun that he keeps underneath the mattress wherever he lays his head, wherever he finds himself, and -- the first shock is that there is no gun to find, simply because he’s not sleeping on a mattress.

Ceiling, inexplicably far away, and the scrolling vines painted onto the tiles stand out to him, and he’s never slept in a room like this one.

And in sitting up, in yanking the blankets reflexively up to his chest even when they’re useless as shields, he’s shifted the heap of quilts beneath him. Squash and give and the dense ground of squares stitched into dark green material, and he’s dug his hip into the floor, but not in a way that makes the joint flare up with pain. Just in a way that lets him know he’s been sleeping curled up, too aware, too much on the defensive, because -- he doesn’t actually know where he is.

Space in the heaped quilts, and he reaches out to the empty space and -- there are ghosting traces of warmth on the pillow, on the other blanket that’s been thrown aside.

Warmth, and -- Noctis takes a deep breath, and fights to understand the sounds he can hear.

Minor-key melody, at once mournful and oddly gentle. Not exactly sweet, because he can hear too many crashing bass-chords, he can hear a persistent descant of grief, and it’s not any kind of music he’s ever heard. 

Unfamiliar.

As are these surroundings: a box of a room, with only the tiles to give it some kind of distinction. The clothes piled next to the door. He recognizes last night’s jacket, and Prompto’s hat, and the bulk of a reserve parachute.

Prompto, he thinks, and getting to his feet is slow and strange because it seems like he’s endlessly caught on the music and he thinks he’s letting it guide him, letting it flow into his skin and bones and that, too, is something he has no real references for. It’s new. It’s not bad. But it’s new.

New has always meant -- something else, has always carried its layers of danger, and now it’s new, to feel nothing of that danger, and how is that possible?

The memories of the previous night are a haze on the edges of his waking mind: all he wants right now is to find that music. Is to understand it.

And three steps out of that room with the quilts -- a room with tiles on the ceiling but not a trace of a window, which might explain the open door, and the music pulling him forward. The notes hooking into his skin, not to hurt and not to maim. He drags one blanket away with him because he’s missing the rest of his clothes and he doesn’t know what he’s going to find in here, weaponless, not quite alone -- 

Here is the huge window and here are the shadows of twining lines, of hand-sized leaves fluttering in what must be some kind of breeze because the window isn’t open in any way. It just admits the view of dark water, and the riffling passing wind that creates the riffling silent cascade of small surf and small waves. The view is crossed by the wide bars on the window, supporting the glass in its single unbroken sheet, and -- vaguely he understands that the window faces west and not east, and it must be a frame for sunsets, for the fires heralding the approach of the night.

Stars, stars in the night that are unfamiliar to him, too. Countryside stars, he thinks. He’s looking out at water and the opposite shore, and the faint lights of -- houses? Boats on the waves?

He’s still stuck on the fluttering patterns of those lights when -- the music stops, and all the world and all the night goes quiet around him: quiet enough that he can hear the shuffling footsteps.

Tension threads his shoulders in jagged lines for only a moment: because there’s a lamp buzzing to life and light next to him and the shade just lets him see the shape of Prompto, wrapped in his own blanket, standing next to him.

“Where are we?” Noctis asks, softly.

“I wasn’t born here. I don’t know where I was born. But this is home, right now. They call that Mirror Bay.” Hand, dwarfed in folds of fabric, gesturing to the window. “Doesn’t look like it right now. But in the autumns, when the full moon rolls around, it’s like the whole body of water goes perfectly still. I guess that’s where the name comes from.”

“Home,” Noctis says, and he doesn’t know why he’s gotten caught on that word. “What does that even mean?”

“I don’t know either. Maybe I shouldn’t have used it,” he hears Prompto say. “It’s hard to explain.”

“I know that,” Noctis says.

And: “The music. Hard to explain, too?”

Quiet laughter, brief. This Prompto sounds nothing like last night. All the urgency and all the roughness drained from his voice. “No, that one’s just -- me. Making things. Trying to make things, and I know I’m nowhere near good at it. But I don’t hate it. The music I make is good enough for me.” Pause. Breath. “Sorry. I woke you up?”

“You did, but maybe you woke me up in a good way.” He explains the quilts, and the lack of the gun, and he looks over at last when that latter part gets him a hollow chuckle. “What?”

“I don’t keep guns in that room. They’re -- ” And he watches Prompto gesture vaguely over his shoulder. “Safe near the piano. Actually. Ravus suggested I keep my guns _in_ the piano. He has no respect for music.”

Noctis nearly snorts out a small laugh of his own, and -- he’s not really surprised, even though he knows next to nothing about Lunafreya’s brother.

“Noctis?”

He turns, because there’s a warning in the word, in his name. More than just a question, somehow.

“Yeah.”

“I killed you last night.”

“You threw us off a building,” he says, quietly, slowly. “And -- we landed. We’re alive now.” Another pause. “ _Are_ we?”

“It was a trick. We landed. But the cameras in that place. Every single one of them will show the same thing. I pushed you off the building and I watched you die. That’s the story.”

“Exit strategy,” Noctis says, slowly, trying out the words on his tongue.

“Yeah. I mean, the way Luna and the others work, the exit strategy always means death but not literal death, you know? Obviously.”

He watches the shiver run through Prompto and this time there’s nothing to stop him from getting in closer, and he throws the end of his blanket around those freckled bared shoulders, and his reward is being held by Prompto once again.

The words from last night catch on him, now, now that he’s letting himself remember them. Remember the details and the asides. “Coffin. You said coffin, last night.”

Another desperate shudder. “Yeah. I really was shut up in one. I don’t mind telling you, next person who tries it on me, I’m kicking the shit out of them and I’m running the hell away.”

“I can help, if you want it, if you want help,” he mutters.

“Yeah. I think I would like you to. And -- and now could you maybe not think about that?”

Prompto is turning a little in his direction, turning just enough so that the glow of the lamp becomes a halo caught on the flyaway sleep-ruffled mess of his hair. Just enough so that his face is in shadow and the only way to catch even a glimpse of his freckles, the scar on his throat, the soft twist of his mouth, is by the faint light coming in through the window -- the distant rays of those houses and boats and the opposite shore, and the faraway sky, and Noctis knows he’s staring, knows he’s been caught staring, and there’s something like rhythm and a faint music in the way they’re breathing, just a little out of sync.

Rhythm and light and shadow and scar and he falls in, falls forward, and his kiss is met with a ragged breath -- familiar, that’s familiar, where has he heard it before? Where has he felt this warmth before?

One kiss becomes two, and three, and becomes a chain, and then Prompto is pulling away just far enough so he can see his smile.

“You remember?”

Slowly, shamefully, he shakes his head. “I know we’ve done this before. And -- that’s all I know.”

Sad lilt in that blink of eyes, in that soft uptick of the corner of his mouth. “Yeah, I know how that feels. Why do you think we’re here and not -- still out there?”

“Out there?”

“Killing because we were told to. Wrecking the world one mission at a time.”

He shakes his head. He frowns. He doesn’t care what he looks like: he feels his mouth thin into a hard line. Feels his own fist close, to the rustled protest of his blanket. “I’m done with that.”

“So am I. I just do what I want, now. And this, this, I remember you wanted this once, so, let me remind you?”

“Yes.” He doesn’t need to consider it: he wants it, he needs it -- 

Prompto, drawing in closer, close enough to whisper right against that warm spot in his face, snug between cheek and mouth: “Intramuros.”

A name. A place. Cobblestones shining, treacherous, in moonlight and in a drift of drizzling rain, the drops tossed on the wind that whistled between the great gaps in the stone walls. Cannon and mortar scars, in a city that had been nearly torn down to its foundations. A colony, a fortress, the lingering historical soul of the place, if it was no longer the political heart. A steel-girdered church with its bells hanging eerily silent, and state secrets squirreled in the bricked-up walls of the adjoining rectory, and the parody of a man in clerical collars and cuffs who’d nearly slashed him open from shoulder to hip -- 

“Aren’t a lot of people who could have been killed -- two ways at once,” Noctis murmurs, in the here and now, remembering. 

Dark soft chuckle. “Yeah. We weren’t even timing it.”

“No, we just got lucky.”

Twin bullet-holes in those false robes, and the collar that soaked up all the blood from the slashed throat, and an entire ream of brittle yellow pages that crackled warningly even after they’d been sealed into a flat pack, and the two of them stealing away into a dark corner to shake out the adrenaline rush, to shake out the half a dozen times they’d nearly been caught over the course of the night, to shake out the impossibility of making it through the night and all of its dangers.

“I never went back there,” Noctis mutters in the here and now. “I spat at my handler, the one time he tried to tell me there was a mission and that I needed to go back there.”

“I couldn’t leave for a fucking month, I was told to stay in place in case anything else happened, and -- I’m never going back there, never, never.”

“So why did you even bring it up?”

“Because that was the only place I actually had the guts to kiss you.”

Noctis smiles, then, and leans in.

Brushes the words against Prompto’s skin: “Doesn’t have to be. Not any more.”

“So you still want to?”

He understands the question, he knows why it had to be asked.

And he says, quiet and clear and clarion-strong: “Yeah.”

“Yeah?” Prompto, echoing him, smiling back -- and Noctis falls into him, gratefully, when he initiates the kiss.

The memories of the cold hall and the cruel whistle of the wind and the stink of spilled blood vanish: this place is small and warm, and the window at his back bears him up and lets in the pinpricks of fading starlight that gather in Prompto’s eyes, when Noctis blinks and catches the warmth of his gaze and that’s something familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

Catch of breath, thump of falling blankets. Dart of nipping teeth, thunder of his own heart beating double-time -- and the beautiful echo of it that he feels in his hand, where he’s holding on to Prompto’s wrist. Shift of that body against his, the sway of hips pressing closer. 

Where does Prompto get the breath to swear at him -- swear at him like prayer, like a rising profane song? “Fuck, I never figured it out, Noct, never figured you out. You wanted me and you never did anything. I wanted you so fucking much. All that time -- ”

He licks an apology into the corner of Prompto’s mouth. “I didn’t have time. I never had time. And you kept -- getting pulled away.”

“Yeah. Reykjavik and Mombasa and Guttenberg and, and, there’s a whole long list. Sofia, I almost killed you in Sofia, that was when I thought I really needed to get the fuck out. And I missed you by fifteen fucking minutes in Incheon -- ”

“Stop thinking about it,” he mutters. “Please let’s not.”

“Make me, help me -- ”

Oh, he can do that. He can’t say no to that -- and he leans in, kisses him for permission -- he catches the glitter in Prompto’s eyes and he gives in to temptation at long last.

Catches him by the throat, very gently.

“Noctis.”

“Is this okay?” he asks.

The answer that he gets isn’t in words: it’s in the pressure, it’s in Prompto leaning into him, and Noctis grins and kisses him again, and he strokes his fingertips past the scar, again and again -- 

“I can feel that, god, don’t stop,” and the words, too, vibrate beneath Noctis’s hand -- 

And he’d be happy here, pinned beneath these scorching kisses, pinned up and without a care for whoever in the night might be seeing them here, seeing them and staring at them, when Prompto nips at his mouth and he pulls back, startled. “What?”

“How do you want me?”

He can’t name the feeling that surges in his chest, that burns his cheeks. “I was going to ask you the same question.”

And that gets him a laugh. “Okay. Okay. I guess you answered my question.”

“Not fair,” he protests, “I don’t even know what the question was.”

“What you preferred.” Kisses to punctuate the words. “Have me?”

“ _Yes._ ”

The thrill of Prompto, the rising voice of him, the shiver of him beneath Noctis -- closer, closer still they cling together, the blankets spread out on the floor and Prompto spread out and moaning his name, and the world narrows down to freckles and high hot flush. To the dazed needy twist in Prompto’s features and the clench of his body. To the way Prompto licks at his mouth, silent spur and whip and lash -- that he fights, and he doesn’t know why -- he’s never wanted anyone like this before and Prompto, just like this, is his every confused and hazy and decadent dream come true -- 

He’s been in gorgeous places. He’s seen gorgeous people.

_Gorgeous_ is not the right word to be using, with Prompto pulling him in, drawing him closer, and Noctis sighs against him.

Falls right into him, into the entirety of him, unquestioning, finally free to need him --

Shiver and beat of their bodies on the move, shiver and shake of the words that fall between them in several languages, shiver and sweet sharp need and heat building between them, and Noctis replaces his hand around Prompto’s throat, fucks him hard and slow and the satisfaction of hearing Prompto cry out as he comes is like blades in his skin, is an instant high and an instant addiction, and he loses himself in him, finally, finally -- 

He breaks on Prompto smiling at him, lamplight catching on the bottomless need in his eyes. On Prompto, wickedly replete, the mess of him spread on their skin.

He’s free.

They are.

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on Tumblr at my FFXV sideblog [@ninemoons42-lestallumhaven](http://ninemoons42-lestallumhaven.tumblr.com/) or at my main [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


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